Who Is Mitt Romney?

When the Republican Party grandees and delegates gather in Tampa next week for their quadrennial Convention, attention will inevitably focus on Paul Ryan, the man Mitt Romney has chosen as his running mate. Ryan has been getting accustomed to the rigors of Presidential campaigning: protesters heckling him at the Iowa State Fair; reporters questioning him about his controversial proposals for Medicare; unnamed Republican operatives whispering to the press that his selection spells doom for the Party. At forty-two, Ryan isn’t the youngest Vice-Presidential candidate in modern times—Dan Quayle, in 1988, was a year younger—but he is one of the most surprising.

Until Romney picked Ryan, the principal rationale for his candidacy had been that he was a practical businessman who could appeal to independents and get the economy moving. Now Romney has tethered himself to a conservative ideologue who serves in an institution, the House of Representatives, that, according to the latest Gallup poll, has an approval rating of ten per cent. Such an abrupt reversal smacks of desperation. Not a Hail Mary pass, exactly, but akin to a struggling N.F.L. team that suddenly decides to adopt the wildcat formation and rely on fakery.

Ryan, whatever one thinks of his views, is a politician of clarity. The scion of a well-to-do Wisconsin family, he arrived in Washington at the age of twenty-one and has been there ever since. He worked for Jack Kemp’s Empower America pressure group; he was elected to Congress when he was twenty-eight and moved up the ranks by staking out a position as a budget expert. He is a village explainer rather than a Michele Bachmann-style ranter, but his rapid rise nonetheless encapsulates the radicalization of the Republican Party. As chairman of the House Budget Committee, he has presented a vision that includes turning Medicare into a voucher program, shrinking non-defense discretionary spending to less than three per cent of G.D.P. (about a quarter of its current level) by 2030, and eliminating all taxes on dividends, capital gains, and inheritances—practically the only taxes that some people of great wealth, such as Romney, actually pay. On non-economic issues, such as abortion and gun control, Ryan has a voting record that puts him in the same camp as Bachmann and other ultra-conservatives.

How much of the Ryan agenda does Romney endorse? For somebody who was once regarded as a moderate, the answer is a surprising amount. Take Medicare. Romney’s campaign Web site says that, after a transition period during which the current system would remain in place, Romney would take the retirement health plan’s budget and use it to pay “a fixed-amount benefit to each senior that he or she can use to purchase an insurance plan.” That’s another way of saying that he would convert Medicare to a Ryanesque voucher system.

On taxes and spending, Romney doesn’t go as far as Ryan, but his budget plan is informed by the same school of supply-side economics that Ryan has promoted since his days with Kemp. Speaking to “CBS This Morning” last week about his and Ryan’s budget plans, Romney said, “There are some differences, but they are very similar.” Ryan would abolish the existing tax system, replacing it with just two rates: ten per cent and twenty-five per cent. Romney would keep the current tax brackets but reduce them all by a fifth. Neither has detailed how he would make up for lost revenues. Independent assessments indicate that both plans would amount to yet another happy day for the already rich.

Both Romney and Ryan profess to be deficit hawks. But, by refusing to consider tax increases and exempting the Pentagon from any reductions in funding, they are obliged to propose cuts to other programs which are simply too big to be credible. To reach Romney’s target of reducing federal spending to twenty per cent of G.D.P. by 2016, Congress would have to slash by forty per cent outlays on things like Medicaid, education, and transportation, one recent study suggested. Romney surely knows that this isn’t going to happen––and shouldn’t. For many independents and moderate Republicans, the best argument for Romney’s candidacy was that, after adopting the rhetoric of the radical right during the primaries, he would recast himself, yet again, as an inoffensive, competent, nonideological technocrat: a former management consultant intent on turning around the finances of U.S.A. Corp. But, with the selection of Ryan, Romney has thrown in his lot with the most ideological wing of his party.

Politics aside, the outlines of a long-term budget fix are easy to discern. Once the economy is strong enough to grow unassisted, Washington needs to adopt a range of spending cuts and revenue increases. Everything should be up for discussion: changes to the income-tax code, entitlement reform, restructuring the Pentagon, higher energy taxes, consumption taxes. Everything. Or close to it. But when, last summer, President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner tried to take some baby steps in this direction, Ryan helped sabotage their efforts. Now that he is on the national ticket—the third Republican Vice-Presidential candidate in a row from the right flank of the Party—what hope is there that a President Romney will face down the G.O.P. ultras and do what the country so evidently needs? And if there isn’t any prospect of this happening why should moderates and independents vote for Romney?

Next week, the Republican standard-bearer will get the chance to address these issues. Ultimately, the Convention is about him, not about Ryan. But, in seeking to win over the American people, he is going to have to explain his choice of running mate and answer a fundamental question that has plagued him from the beginning: Who is Mitt Romney? ♦